from the note:-they're-not-the-same dept

So, Tim Cushing already discussed the magically declassified FISC opinion, concerning how the NSA violated the 4th Amendment for many years with its searches. There's a lot of information in that and the other documents the Director of National Intelligence is finally disclosing (mostly due to FOIA requests, rather than the administration's professed newfound love of transparency). For example, it shows how, once again, the NSA has been incredibly misleading concerning the various revelations over the past few months. Let's take PRISM, for example, the program under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act that allows the government to access certain internet communications (not metadata, actual communications).

According to the NSA fact sheet, this program "does not allow the government to target the phone calls or emails of any U.S. citizen or any other U.S. person anywhere in the world, or any person known to the in the United States. It only allows the targeting of communications of foreigners, and even then only when those communications may have foreign intelligence value." The agency further notes that "any information about U.S. persons that may be incidentally acquired" is subject to "minimization procedures."

Targeted communications of foreigners, only when those communications may have foreign intelligence value. Okay. So, that actually makes some sense. We expect the NSA to be, for example, trying to get access to Al Qaeda bosses' emails. But... the reality as shown in the FISC ruling suggests it's not limited, it's barely targeted and those minimization procedures aren't taken very seriously. As you may recall, this is the very same fact sheet that Senator Wyden called out for being near-complete bullshit and which the NSA then removed.

The Government may only use Section 702 to acquire foreign intelligence information, which is specifically, and narrowly, defined in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. This requirement applies across the board, regardless of the nationality of the target.

Except, of course, as we've been seeing over and over again, "foreign intelligence information" is not narrowly defined, and it doesn't appear that the NSA is very careful about all of this. From the FISC ruling we learn that this "small" and supposedly "targeted" project is something much much larger:

NSA acquires more than two hundred fifty million Internet communications each year pursuant to Section 702, but the vast majority of these communications are obtained from Internet service providers and are not at issue here..... Indeed, NSA's upstream collection constitutes only approximately 9% of the total Internet communications being acquired by NSA under Section 702.

If you don't follow this closely, it can be a bit difficult to parse out. The "upstream" collection is the stuff we were just talking about concerning snarfing up data directly from telcos. This "non upstream" data that is "obtained from Internet service providers" is PRISM (as noted in a footnote), and is the program that the NSA and the White House kept insisting above are narrow and targeted. Yet, here, they're admitting that via PRISM, they're getting 91% of the internet communications they're collecting -- which is 228 million records. Collected from tech companies via PRISM.

That's not targeted. Those 228 million communications are not "only when those communications may have foreign intelligence value." And I have difficulty seeing how anyone can call it "incidental" given the size. It appears to be an absolutely massive program that, once again, the NSA, the administration and their supporters have continued to misrepresent.

from the you-would-think-their-lawyers-would-notice-this dept

Admittedly, parts of copyright law are quite complicated, but there are some basics that are rather simple and straightforward: such as that you cannot sue for statutory or punitive damages if you haven't registered your copyrights with the US copyright office. So, when the Premiere Football League sued Google/YouTube for hosting some videos of matches two years ago, I assumed at the very least that it had registered its copyrights in the US. Apparently not. A judge has tossed out pushed back on the Premier League's attempt to get higher damages awards, along with some other foreign claimants' for not being covered by US copyright law. You would have thought this was something the Premier League's lawyers would have noticed before filing the lawsuit.Update: Eric Goldman has a lot more details on the specifics of the case, which the original News.com article was a bit misleading. Definitely make sure you read Goldman's post to understand the mixed nature of the ruling. Also, based on this we're updating some of the points in the post to clarify. Thanks to everyone who pointed out some of the specifics. Update 2: After discussing this with a few different lawyers (as per usual -- none of them agree with each other!) it seemed best to just point people to Eric's analysis of this decision. Once again, this is what's great about using this blog as a conversation, helping us all to learn. Thanks to everyone who chimed in and contributed (whether via comments or email).